Lang Lit coursework introduction and missed lessons

Intellectuals,

your coursework will require a great deal of independent reading and should allow ou to choose texts that will really stimulate/engage you.

If you missed the first lesson back, here is the powerpoint introducing the coursework.

If you haven't collected your coursework booklet, you need to do so asap and you need to keep it safe over the summer or you will have to photocopy someone else's at your own expense.

Remember to listen to more of these Dangerous Visions radio plays before you write your own (homework to be on your blog or handed in for Tuesday's lesson - even if you missed the lesson). Use as many of the conventions of radio plays as you can and use the notes you made on 'Produce' to help you use the conventions and structures well.

If you missed today's lesson (Fri 10th), you should finish reading the extract of 1984 in the coursework booklet and use it to help you write a 3-paragraph description of the college if it had been taken over by a totalitarian group (you choose if that is a religious, political, alien etc. group). Focus on descriptions of how the college would look  if other rules had been imposed - we walked around and thought about how the reception, Cafe Max, the lift, the posters, the electronic devices etc would be different. We are going to improve the paragraphs in class on Tuesday.

Performance evaluations of men and women and why women talk less

This is fascinating research I got to from this very useful post about why women talk less.

Language change - slang

An easy way into a 'second year' topic - slang is one of the key ways in which our language develops, driven by young people (reasons for and ways in which language changes are vital to understand). Here is an article that covers some key examples - memorise a few that belong to MLE (multicultural London English) for the coming year's study. You might want to notice if some of them are already spreading further or falling out of use. Why might that be?

This is still a talking point - schools banning slang. What do you think?

It is an area of endless research, perhaps because it goes out of date so fast and has such shaky foundations in that people are not always agreed on what slang terms mean and often, if they are ever written down, write and use them differently. But here's a review of a book researching slang where some of the key ideas are explored. Do you agree that slang is often not creative but borrows words from elsewhere (or elsewhen)?

If you keep up with Dan Clayton's blog, you will have already seen these links. If you don't, you should!

Occupation links for paper 2

Here's an article about jargon - skip over any difficult bits and see where it goes.

And some more examples of corporate jargon.

This is about gender but could be made very relevant to an occupation topic.

World Englishes - Chicano

We are extending our study of accent and dialect past the UK this year and we are adding 'world Englishes' which includes the way other countries use English, business English, English as a lingua franca etc. Here is a link to a page describing an interesting American variety I have only just heard of: Chicano. Chicano is almost a creole although it is much more heavily weighted towards English than Spanish so the researcher rightly regards it more as a kind of dialect of English, but pidgins and creoles will be an area we will investigate as part of 'world Englishes'.

Dialect examples for paper 2

Preparednesses,

here's a link to a recent Guardian article on some dialectal varieties of words.

here's a link to a term for grammatical variation you could use. And the next tab is 'social variation' if you fancy taking it a bit further.

current thinking about valuing women's language

Along with the Mary Beard discussion about how women's voices are not valued (see my post and the link to her article here), here is a useful opinion piece ( - you could use some of these ideas in your essay or your opinion piece but you must link them to theory e.g. Lakoff vs Cameron). It is important to have a perspective on current thinking - the task I set you about 'should women change their language' (which too few of you have done in time to get it marked) almost invites you to say they should, but it is a trap! Discuss the idea that women's language is deficient from the perspective that it isn't, please! Otherwise you look like you are not well-read on current thinking.